Relationships are complex and multifaceted. Arguments over infidelity, step-families, money, sex, in-laws, children, drug and alcohol abuse, illness, job loss, and a host of other stressors, can ignite a war sizable enough to leave profound casualties in its wake.
While some not so serious issues can be dealt with by a couple who is willing to cooperate with each other, and work hard to make things better, many more difficult situations are not that simple to fix. Under such circumstances, a valuable tool that can potentially help pull the couple out of its troubled predicament is marriage therapy, also referred to as couple’s counseling.
Thirty-two years ago, my marriage was in trouble. We had just gotten married after dating for less than a year. The relationship took an immediate hit only two weeks into dating when, my now present husband, was given sole custody of his seven-year-old son. I, too, had a son the same age from a previous marriage. Things got challenging fast. Soon, as it often happens in step-families, our new foursome split up into two camps: my husband and his son, and me and my boy. No one knew how to handle the ever-worsening familial crisis.
We tried, without success, to fix the blended family problem on our own, but it didn’t work. Things deteriorated even more when our third child came along. On the verge of divorce, we decided to give marriage therapy a try. The therapist worked with us, helped us understand what was truly happening, and offered us a variety of techniques to deal with our particular conditions. She normalized our experience and taught us better communication skills. A year later, we were doing much better, and were able to terminate our bi-weekly sessions, taking with us a set of highly-effective tools to help us should we encounter rough patches in the future.
In fact, I was so inspired by our success, that I decided to become a Marriage & Family Therapist myself
